Okay so this is what I know. The only gene they've isolated so far in people repulsed by cilantro is a gene that makes people hypersensitive to aldehydes, a chemical compound frequently found in perfumery.
So "tastes like soap" could mean that cilantro tastes like the smell of aldehydes used in the fragrance of some soaps. Fragrances often have dozens of ingredients, and people with aldehyde sensitivity are more likely to notice this part of the soap fragrance.
Perhaps people who like cilantro don't smell cilantro in soap because they don't have the gene that allows them to pick that smell out in a (complex) soap fragrance.
However. Cilantro doesn't taste like soap to everyone who has the gene.
To me, cilantro tastes like bugs.
Specifically, it tastes the way stinkbugs smell when you startle or crush them. (wiki describes their smell as "oily, dusty, woody and earthy, and like coriander" which is another word for cilantro)
And the reason these bugs smell/taste bad is because they use similar aldehydes to cilantro to make a "don't eat me I'm poisonous" scent that will repulse predators.
So for question 2, cavemen didn't have soap, but they did have stinky bugs and having a gene that would help you sniff them out could be helpful. So I guess cilantro smelled like bugs to cavemen. Now that we use aldehydes in soap, it smells like soap.
BTW you can apparently train your brain to like cilantro by eating it more frequently and associating it with pleasant dishes. I haven't tried this yet though. Because... bugs.
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