Some Navel Gazing is totally appropriate on a Saturday night/Sunday Morning
On Thursday and Friday nights this past week, I volunteered at an emergency shelter. Tucson declared a state of emergency due to the cold and the fact that 14k people were without heat. Unfortunately, the shelter didn't get a lot of usage but, still, awesome idea
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I got a diagnosis in my mid-twenties. Because of increased recognition of high-functioning ASD and learning disorders, kids today get recognised in day care or primary school. However, people of my generation or older don't get a DX unless we recognise it in ourselves and seek it. Asperger's research didn't get translated into English until after the fall of the Berlin wall. By that time, I was in late primary school, headed for high school. By the time Asperger Syndrome and high-functioning autism were widely recognised in the English speaking world, I was almost an adult. There are millions of people out there who only find out about their own ASD when they have a child and that child gets diagnosed - like Liane Holliday Willey, and Valerie Paradiž.
Eye contact is a big thing that people have trouble with, though some autists go the other way - making eye contact that is far too intense. I have had patches of this myself in the past. Like you said, though, eye contact might be a cultural thing - I know we got taught in my childcare course that some cultures find 'polite' eye contact by Western standards to be rude by theirs.
Other things that might be indicators that you are talking to someone on the spectrum are modulation problems - speaking in a monotone or with an unusual prosody (my brother pauses at odd points), too loudly, too quietly,or with an unconscious escalating volume.
Also, a one track mind. You meet someone who only wants to talk about trains, science fiction or baseball averages (all terminal clichés, but for a reason) and doesn't take any subtle cues for a topic change, they're likely autistic.
Inappropriate affect is another. They may talk about something incredibly sad or upsetting, but smile or laugh throughout. Or, they may laugh at another person's pain. A classic example is in Jon Elder Robison's book. As a child, he was punished for responding with ecstatic smiling on hearing another child had died. He was smiling out of relief because it wasn't him who had been killed, a perfectly understandable response, but not considered acceptable.
Also, there's a pretty big crossover with things like OCD and Tourette's. It's very common for people on the spectrum to have ritualistic behaviour, grimaces or tics. These tend to be involuntary (or near enough to) or even completely unconscious. It's pretty closely related to stimming behaviours (self stimulating) like rocking, foot tapping, hand flapping, etc. Pretty much all autists have some form of self-stimulation. It's a way of regulating anxiety and overload.
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