1. Tooth wearing as a measure of age is complicated by bread. Saxon-era bread contains a lot of grit because it's ground between actual stones. Eating gritty bread wears down teeth. So a 30-year-old who ate bread their whole life would have teeth wear comparable to a much older person in a population that either didn't eat bread, or ate non-gritty bread (like we do today). We do know the Saxons were big bread-eaters. We don't know what population was used as the control for TFA.
2. The "grooming tool" thing is a little strange. The grooming tools appear as a set in the late Romano-British period, and vary between individuals, but are generally composed of tweezers, nail-cleaning blade, snips, a little spoon perfect for cleaning wax from ears, and similar stuff. They appear to have been worn dangling from the belt by a thong, carried around routinely like a Swiss army knife. It's reasonable to assume that at some point in your life, you got a set of them, either as a gift or because you could, and you carried on wearing them ever afterwards. So, yes, older people are more likely to have them ;) But not necessarily because old people were "higher status" or more into personal grooming.
1. Tooth wearing as a measure of age is complicated by bread. Saxon-era bread contains a lot of grit because it's ground between actual stones. Eating gritty bread wears down teeth. So a 30-year-old who ate bread their whole life would have teeth wear comparable to a much older person in a population that either didn't eat bread, or ate non-gritty bread (like we do today). We do know the Saxons were big bread-eaters. We don't know what population was used as the control for TFA.
2. The "grooming tool" thing is a little strange. The grooming tools appear as a set in the late Romano-British period, and vary between individuals, but are generally composed of tweezers, nail-cleaning blade, snips, a little spoon perfect for cleaning wax from ears, and similar stuff. They appear to have been worn dangling from the belt by a thong, carried around routinely like a Swiss army knife. It's reasonable to assume that at some point in your life, you got a set of them, either as a gift or because you could, and you carried on wearing them ever afterwards. So, yes, older people are more likely to have them ;) But not necessarily because old people were "higher status" or more into personal grooming.